The bus to Bondowoso took 3 hours so i didn't arrive there until 5pm. Went to the Palm Hotel (one of the only two hotels listed in Lonely Planet) which was very nice but had no cheap rooms. It just so happened that a group of 5 Dutch girls and a French couple also turned up at the same time. We thus all headed off to the only other hotel mentioned in the guidebook, the Hotel Anugerah. It was deserted - probably because it’s expensive (150,000INR a room + 10% govt tax) and not very nice. We tried to get the owner to give us a discount as there were eight of us but she wouldn’t (a lot of Indonesians it would seem don’t have very good business sense from my experience). We thus headed off to find another hotel that the guy sitting next to me on the bus had told me was cheap, the Ijen View Hotel. It was on the other side of town and took about half an hour to find/ reach the place. Depressingly it was really posh with rooms costing 365,000INR a night! We asked if they knew of a cheap hotel nearby and they gave us the address of a place 5mins away. It was indeed cheap (only 77,000INR a room) trouble was it was a real shithole with no showers just 'bucket washing’ and generally rundown and neglected. By now we were all extremely pissed off so decided we would ‘bite the bullet’ and go back to the Palm Hotel and pay for their expensive rooms as it was the nicest place we had seen and the best value for money. The 5 Dutch girls managed to get a big room for themselves and i shared with the French couple. Our room cost 300,000INR but the hotel was nice and did have a great swimming pool. Strangely however, despite the hotel being expensive to stay in the onsite restaurant was very cheap offering meals from 15,000INR and they were tasty. Bizzarre.